Transcriber: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Capa Girl
These steps are in Rio, Brazil.
What I love about them is that even though all the pieces are decorated differently,
different shapes, sizes, colours,
when you put them all together,
they still get you to where you need to go.
Do you think that society is nurturing this kind of complexity?
Unlocking creativity is beneficial for us all
and I'll be illustrating why through the lessons that I've learned.
But before I do I'd like to paint a picture for you.
Just imagine, if you can,
a fifteen-year-old girl is in the higher tier of their maths class.
She gets to an exam; she sees a problem from three different ways.
First she begins to solve it one way,
and then she feels the pressure of the clock,
and decides to solve it another way.
Then she sees the pressure again, so she decides to solve it another.
That girl has just spent 10 minutes on a problem that should have taken her 2.
No one has nurtured her ability to diversify problem solving,
because the standard norm has been to focus on speed and efficiency
over and above everything else.
Because of this, people think she is slow and in the wrong class.
So this person learns out of force,
to leave all those diverse ways of problem solving behind.
Rather than exploring them she decides
that she must conform in order to get ahead.
As a result she becomes narrowly focused
and criticizes anyone who tries to be diverse,
open, and interdisciplinary in approach.
This is the profile of many successful students that we're turning out today.
And I know this because this student was myself.
I saw that the only way to get ahead was to be a compliant robot.
Luckily, I woke up.
Since then I've been on a mission to unbound the chains of creativity.
Here is one girl who I was told she wasn't creative.
But here we see her playing around with shadows and light.
She needed structure, she needed a framework, she needed rules
before she could be inventive and innovative with them.
Everyone is creative and we all have unlimited creative potential.
But when people think or they are told that they are not creative,
it is what they have been doing has not been recognized or valued.
In order to recognize and unbound each other's potential,
we need to allow diversity in creativity.
Here you see others in the class; they worked in different ways.
They were asked to express simply what their project was about.
There are so many symbols there, a pen, a heart and a mask,
a couple of English adjectives.
This shows all their diversity.
More often than not our dominant institutions, people or media
are telling us that everything must go through
one or two best models in order to be recognized.
But this is going against humanity's diversity.
We are at a point in history where we all have considerable tools
to evaluate, question, criticize, synthesize and rebuild
whole defunct systems that are desperately needed.
Those that are diversifying their talents
and experimenting with all these considerable resources that we have
are being told that what they produce is not relevant.
Testing is focusing on catching out students
and therefore it is emphasizing control,
rather than giving them a chance to explore,
test and evaluate their own ways of thinking.
So how can we bridge our diverse ways of expressing ourselves to real life?
Here you see when I was in Japan,
the main role models were basically housewives or someone on the battlefield.
I decided that I was going to support them
in exploring Japanese women through creativity.
What we explored were women Samurais,
a writer, an astronaut, a philanthropist.
But the difference was is that we creatively experimented with their choices
and the choices they made from their historical contexts.
This created a bridge from them to the girls
in their own lives and their own situations.
Through the performance, these girls put themselves in the women's shoes
and they saw what they valued, which in turn make them think
about what they personally valued in their contexts.
Afterwards, some of the girls who had been lying on the desk before,
were now running round in a complete frenzy
telling me that they wanted to be a vet.
Another girl said that she wanted to be a lawyer.
It woke them up by unlocking their creativity
and exploring values in the historical contexts.
Sometimes role models that people choose to emulate
are from media standard image of perfection
and they're not always a healthy choice.
When you're faced with six teenage girls who tell you
that all they want to do is be a model, what do you do?
You could try and preach or as what we did was do a music workshop.
What happened?
One of the girls was now standing behind the camera
telling us, go left a bit, go right a bit
and trying to find the best shot for the video.
She showed potential at being an excellent director.
Another girl was fiddling around with her phone
to try and find the best rhythmic beat.
Another was coordinating the team and we also had a dancer in the group.
A great range of talents would have been left unexplored
if we hadn't allowed room for risk taking.
Girls may think that the best option available for her is to be a model.
But if we judge that then we are invalidating them.
So we have to allow them
the space to risk-take without completely rejecting
their choices in the first place.
We spent time getting to know the girls.
And when we did this, then some of their inhibiting factors,
about what they thought they should be, started to dissolve.
They started to think more deeply about how to express themselves,
their thoughts, their feelings, their values,
and how to bring these out in representations of themselves.
When girls, also boys, are given space
to explore layers of values in a personal way,
what they value becomes integrated with who they are
and how they see themselves.
One of the girls here loved waterfalls
and when she explored her values more deeply,
then it transformed into both her body and her hair.
Another loved Hebrew, so one of the letters became her eye.
Another thought she valued Justin Timberlake.
But as she got deeper with her values, she realized
that's not really what I value, and then she painted over that
and had a representation of herself.
There is nothing wrong with taking role models from the media.
We all need stimulation and who am I to impose my value system
upon theirs.
But it is what you do with those references,
how you imitate them,
and if you imitate them without thinking what they mean,
is that really right?
Or do you want to explore deeper and see what value they have for you?
We need to guide each other to feel safe, to unlock deeper values,
because we all have diverse creative expressions.
When people's main reference point is from their values,
then there is a transformation.
There is no longer a slave to the feedback loop,
but people begin to reveal their true selves.
Here a girl is criticizing the representation of girls as dolls.
Another girl explores her values: painting, music, friends and family.
People start feeling comfortable with their differences,
instead of neutralizing them to fit into one standard norm.
Another girl sees herself as a jigsaw puzzle that she must fit together.
We need to provide environments where we can experiment
with our different diversities.
We can risk shaking what is portrayed as unchangeable reality,
whether in the past, present and future,
and we can choose what we construct.
It is then that we see reality as diverse, dynamic, fluid and changeable.
When we can explore the diversely teaching and learning strategies,
in this way we become co-investigators in the creative learning process.
But how can we foster these spaces of creative diversity?
It's when we're willing to take risks.
Goethe said no one can control what is creative,
you just have to let it get it's own way.
Here a teacher said, "Go crazy!"
What's interesting is that even their poses are diverse.
We all surrender to this experience.
The outcomes; three very different sculptures.
Completely unexpected but unified through a performance.
We let the creative forces flow and we went beyond ourselves.
It took us further than we ever could have imagined
if we had expected and prescribed outcomes.
You all know this: Bruegel's "Children's Games".
But what do you see when you look a bit closer?
Are they just children playing?
So how can we nurture play and risk taking?
We need to let go of our inhibiting factors.
Here teenagers from Nigeria and Ghana were making a music video.
When faced with the microphone, they said,
"We are black boys on the street,
we like to fuck on the street, we like to fuck on the street."
As you can see they were imitating gangster rap.
Meanwhile, another friend from Afghanistan was making another part of the video,
and expressing the theme of love in his own language.
So we connected the two.
These teenagers started to explore the theme of love.
When somebody shows you that their heart is real, then you know love is real.
Basically I'll show you love and you show me love.
The difference between what they were singing before
and what they were singing now was massive.
We need to provide open, protective environments that encourage risk
and so in this way we can foster
intercultural expressions on the same theme.
I was working with some new people recently, but we kept having conflicts.
While we were having a discussion I peeked at my colleagues notes.
His way of understanding what we were talking about was like this;
my way of understanding it was like this.
You can see the difference.
We don't have the same ways of approaching the same thing.
The way in which we create our lives and express ourselves,
our problems and the way that we build our world
are as diverse and as colorful as we are.
We are creating new symbolic languages
and behaviors that are non-linear and organic.
To understand and accept these,
we need to access broader parts of our humanity,
and in this way we will facilitate a deeper bonding.
We can do this by unlocking creativity.
I think we all need to welcome our creative expressions
to our Earth tree, our tree of life.
We all have wishes that are linked to our values
and these wishes are sometimes small, sometimes large.
Sometimes we must allow for these, we must allow room
for these to creatively share and so we can look at, we can take away,
we can think about and find space for all these wishes
without rejecting and invalidating them.
It is in this way that we can find unity in a diversity
instead of focusing on one norm that is completely not what we are.
As humans we are all very different.
The way in which we can explore this diversity
is by risking being wrong.
And if we're not afraid to be wrong then we can accept this kind of diversity.
Thank you.
(Applause)